Carrie Olivia Adams : From Bridges

 

 

 

 

moth caught in a gale and blown against a wall and clinging there beating feebly

The symmetry of the little beasts as their wings open and close me. I am the shadow of dust. Every bridge makes an underside. There, the ego, a bruise. The mind just a ball of thread, unraveled. I’m quiet again except for the brush of air as it leaves me. I hold my hands up to make an arch until my blood can’t stand it. I’ve been known to take the nightmare out on my body. I let its hunger eat me.

I now believe that you and I are, strangely enough, included among those who are doomed to live.

 

 

 

 

Do us both the favor of a last gasp of breath. I’ve watched the heart beat itself into submission. I’ve seen the way a body struggles to turn itself inside out when in pain, when it can feel itself drowning in its own overwhelm. How it writhes and tries to seek a place to lie down where it can be still. But the stillness does not come until we deliver it. 

To live after that stillness. When the heart breaks itself into a pain that can only be lived, not sublimated, not softened.

 

 

 

 

I sympathize with her desire not to let things be final. Absence is always what follows. And, our minds don’t easily accept the hole of the absent thing. Shadows come alive. Dreams try to convince us that the absent ones will return. Sleep says that we’ve mistaken a short trip for death. That even death has an end. Ghosts are a great source of comfort. That’s why she calls them continually in her speeches to us. A recitation as a resuscitation of history. Her hands pounding the chests of family. Those beautiful homes. Those emblazoned coffins that must have only held the bodies of insistently good souls.

 

 

 

 

It was as though it had not been she who spoke, but the house itself that said the words

And so I admonished it. Struggled to abolish and absolve it. That stench that sticks to the floorboards; carpets matted with dark red mud. Trekked from a triangular tract formed at the mouth, her river of endless speech, her river that runs without acknowledgment. The aspiration of a delta looking north. Say no more about what could have been. Water always wins. And the house sinks.

Beyond those stairs, a boarded room, nailed and sealed, to keep the history in, the war zone out. To listen, you’d believe it was all about family glory and the sacrifices of kind men. The house wouldn’t lie to you, would it? Do you trust the floors you cannot see? The rooms you cannot visit? Paper over. Nail over. Over and over.

 

 

 

 

To make the rending gash 

He said to put something down.
Put down your burden.
Put down your roots.
Put down your name.
Put down payment.
Put down the blinds.
                     Put someone down.

<<Woe to that country where the sun of liberty has to rise up out of a sea of blood.>>

 

 

 

 

<<They are at the mercy of the people, and the people are without mercy.>>

The river runs black with blood. And the air in the house is thick with smoke, smoke to hide the faces stored in its crevices. I don’t know how to talk about what has been erased. The people she unsees as people. The labor that made her world possible. The humanity its making broke. The tired, worn bodies of men, women, and children who had to recreate for themselves a dignity, a breath, a repose.

 

 

 

 

That is the substance of remembering 

The cotton threads that tie us to them. Come to us like the wrappings and trappings of heat. The mummification of a body left to the steam.

 

 

 

 

It was that innocence again, that innocence, which believed that the ingredients of morality were like the ingredients of pie or cake

We talk just enough that she knows I am alive. The roses in bloom. The rotating complaints of another season. Enough that she can remind me again that we are always the victims of our own choices. As though we cannot be the victims of others' choices as well. Innocence may be impossible or not worth talking of, but aren’t we born into the weight of someone’s choices, carrying something before we can raise our heads to acquiesce?
There are a lot of choices I’d like to make again, and even more that I wish hadn’t been made for us. There’s hubris, and there is fate, and I have raged against both and lost.
I have looked the other way.
I have stepped around the body on the sidewalk and called it safety.                                                                                                 

 

 

 

Please note:

Italics are drawn from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, and bold text from The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery by John Jacobs

 

 

 

 

Carrie Olivia Adams [photo credit: Emilie Robinson] lives in Chicago, where she is the executive editor for the nonprofit press Black Ocean and the promotions and marketing communications director for the University of Chicago Press. Her books include The Book of Marys and Glaciers, Be the thing of memory, Operating Theater, Forty-One Jane Doe’s, and Intervening Absence in addition to the chapbooks Proficiency Badges, Grapple, Overture in the Key of F, and A Useless Window. She writes the “Poetry & Biscuits” newsletter on Substack and curates a house reading series by the same name. When she’s not making poems, she’s making biscuits.

 

Carrie Olivia Adams : On Black Ocean at 15 Years

 

 

 

 

 

It has been 15 years since Black Ocean began publishing books, and the small press poetry scene has grown and changed dramatically since that time. It’s been incredible to see such an explosion that has created space for so many different voices, perspectives, styles, and approaches. And both poetry-writers and poetry-readers have benefited from this wealth of avenues for publication and the availability of a broad variety of books and chapbooks.

And now, as we look ahead to our next 15 years in publishing, the challenge is two-fold: how do we make the press sustainable in the long term? And how do we continue to evolve with the poetry scene while maintaining some consistent and recognizable idea of what a Black Ocean book is?

One of the strengths of Black Ocean is that it’s always been a labor of love. The press has been volunteer-led by co-founder Janaka Stucky and myself, and while that has meant that each project has been a passion project, and each book and author and translator has had our true commitment and confidence, it has also meant that we’re constantly trying to shoehorn the business of publishing into the rest of our workaday and family lives. In the last few years, we’ve been looking to try to find a way to ensure that Black Ocean could thrive into the future and wouldn’t be entirely reliant on the two of us (who may be missing a little of the energy of our entrepreneurial youth).

In the last year, Janaka has been taking the lead on putting together a long-term plan for Black Ocean that would allow us to maintain our creative vision while providing for the future of the press. Consequently, we’re now entering a partnership with west coast publisher Not a Cult, to form a new publishing group, called Chapter House. Chapter House will contain several projects moving forward, including a forthcoming speculative fiction label. And, as part of this shift, we’ve already moved our catalog into wider distribution through Consortium, something our current authors are already benefiting from. And, by being able to share some back-office services and resources as a part of a collective, we’re confident in the viability of Black Ocean’s future as a creative enterprise that continues to grow beyond what we ever could have imagined decades ago.

At the same time, we’re trying to do all that we can to strengthen Black Ocean’s list and to ensure that it’s engaging with the contemporary poetry conversation and is representative of the spectrum of lyrical voices writing today. Black Ocean has always had a distinct and recognizable aesthetic, from the design of our books to the poetry within their pages. But, we’ve also never wanted to be too easy to pin down. One of the greatest joys as an editor is discovery—and our commitment to new voices has never wavered.

To continue to keep that commitment we’ve been expanding our avenues for finding new writers and for new writers to discover Black Ocean as a potential home for their work. We’ve been incredibly excited that Lillian-Yvonne Bertram has joined us this year as an editor-at-large and has been not only helping to scout new work but to serve as a close consultant on our editorial decisions. And, at the same, we’ve decided to spread out our open submissions across the year and have particular submission periods that are attentive to the variety and diversity of work that we seek, including translations, first books, and historically underrepresented writers.

I feel like these are the perennial questions faced by any publisher who has been lucky enough to be around for this long—how do we stay true to the reasons why readers seek our books while also recognizing that poetry and art continue to shift (which is why we love it so)? I am proud of the ways that Black Ocean continues to evolve, and I think there’s going to be a lot to look forward to from us in the future.

 

 

 

 

Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago where she is the Promotions and Marketing Communications Director for the University of Chicago Press and the poetry editor for Black Ocean. Her books include Be the thing of memory, Operating Theater, Forty-One Jane Doe’s, and Intervening Absence in addition to the chapbooks Proficiency Badges, Grapple, Overture in the Key of F, and A Useless Window. When she’s not making poems, she’s making biscuits.